This was Le Guin’s third novel and, at 170 pages, is nearly twice as long as her first two – something which often happen as writers find their feet, their voice, and understand better how to develop plots, characters and themes. (For no particular reason I’m reminded of John Le Carré, whose first two books are brisk murder mysteries of about 150 pages apiece, but whose third novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, was 250 pages long and a significant step up in terms of complexity and depth. Something similar happens here with Le Guin’s third book.)
Anyway, after the hectic feel of her first two science fantasy novels, in which incident follows incident at a breathless pace – in a way which feels carefully tailored for a pulp science fiction audience which expects a new alien around every corner – City of Illusions introduces the still colourful but slower and more thoughtful pace which was to characterize her work from then on.
In fact you can almost see the process happening before your eyes, since the novel falls into roughly two parts, the event-packed Journey and the more puzzling and thoughtful Arrival. If the Journey features a string of encounters with weird and wonderful folk and sometimes very violent – as in the previous narratives – it is really only a preface to the Arrival, when the hero has to find The Truth and struggle towards Self Knowledge – the kind of semi-mystical and psychologically searching theme which was to become more prominent in the later books.
Le Guin had already used the Journey as the structure of her first novel, Rocannon’s World (hero journeys south with loyal companions, encountering a variety of baddies and aliens who shed light on the strange new universe Le Guin has created) — and was to use it in arguably her two most famous novels:
- The Left Hand of Darkness (hero undertakes epic journey across glaciers, snowstorms, blizzards, and gains greater self-knowledge)
- The Dispossessed (hero journeys from his egalitarian communist society to a high-pressure, capitalist society and gains greater self-knowledge)
Zove’s House
A man struggles to regain consciousness in a dark forest. He staggers out into a clearing and is taken in by the hippy family living there, in the House of Zove the patriarch. He stays five years. They name him Falk. They teach him their language (a version of the common tongue, Galaktika) and their peaceful, farming ways. He falls in love with Parth, the pretty hippy who was fifteen when she first saw him emerge from the forest. She likes to sit and weave cloth at a solar-powered loom. The young men teach him to hunt, using a lasergun. Oh, and Falk isn’t human. He is marked out from other humans by virtue of his yellow eyes which have no whites to them, like a cat’s eyes, a lynx’s eyes.
The pupil was large; the iris, of a grayed amber color, was oval lengthwise so that the white of the eye did not show at all. ‘Like a cat,’ said Garra.
Slowly, from various cunningly scattered details, we realise that:
- We are on earth
- Two or three thousand years in the future.
- What we think of as civilization is dead and gone. From a few casual references later in the book it is confirmed that we are in America (Falk meets the Lord of Kansas and there are two references to California, most of which is now a lake, the Great Earthquake having, apparently, sunk most of it into the sea).
Zove’s House is in the great Eastern Forest and that’s about all its inhabitants know. There are no roads. There are no villages or towns. There is no trade. They live in isolation on their farm carved out of the vast endless forest and nobody ever comes to see them and nobody ever leaves.
Zove’s House was a rambling, towering, intermitted chalet-castle-farmhouse of stone and timber; some parts of it had stood a century or so, some longer. There was a primitiveness to its aspect: dark staircases, stone hearths and cellars, bare floors of tile or wood. But nothing in it was unfinished; it was perfectly fireproof and weatherproof; and certain elements of its fabric and function were highly sophisticated devices or machines—the pleasant, yellowish fusion-lights, the libraries of music, words and images, various automatic tools or devices used in house-cleaning, cooking, washing, and farmwork, and some subtler and more specialized instruments kept in workrooms in the East Wing. All these things were part of the House, built into it or along with it, made in it or in another of the Forest Houses. The machinery was heavy and simple, easy to repair; only the knowledge behind its power-source was delicate and irreplaceable
We learn that the thin population and absence of towns or even villages is supposed to have come about due to THE SHING. At some point in the past, after earth had joined the interplanetary League of all the Worlds (which was mentioned in the previous two novels) there was a great catastrophe: the SHING invaded and conquered. The Shing look like humans, identical to humans, but they overthrew human civilization, bred humans to become docile and quiescent, oversaw the collapse of human culture, reduced humanity to scattered communities, prevented them from meeting, uniting, becoming a force. Instead the survivors live among the wreck of the old civilization, using only the limited smart tech permitted to them (like small scale laser guns and sun-powered looms) only occasionally glimpsing on the Shing’s aircars passing overhead, far up in the sky.
At least – and here’s the distinctive thing about the book – at least that’s what the hero is told. These are the ancient legends the inhabitants of Zove’s House tell him, and the people he meets on his journey tell him lots of other legends and rumours, with the result that he and the reader become pretty confused, Le Guin trying to create in the reader’s mind the sense of confusion and uncertainty which characterises her characters.
The Journey
After five years learning the language and ways of the peaceable Zove household, Falk’s difference becomes unbearable to him:
‘While I was studying with Ranya this past summer, she showed me how I differ from the human genetic norm. It’s only a twist or two of a helix… a very small difference. Like the difference between wei and o.’ Zove looked up with a smile at the reference to the Canon which fascinated Falk, but the younger man was not smiling. “However, I am unmistakably not human. So I may be a freak; or a mutant, accidental or intentionally produced; or an alien. I suppose most likely I am an unsuccessful genetic experiment, discarded by the experimenters… There’s no telling. I’d prefer to think I’m an alien, from some other world. It would mean that at least I’m not the only creature of my kind in the universe.’
Maybe he is a Raze, a human whose mind has been erased. Plagued by these endless doubts, Falk decides it is time to find out who he is. He will set out to the fabled city of Es Toch, supposed capital of the Shing. He has a scene with Zove, the patriarch of the house, who wisely tells him ‘it is time to move on’.
His friends Metock and Thurro pack a bag of provisions and give him a copy of the Canons (these – as in so many dystopias – are texts of the half-understood remnants of ancient religions: some have an Eastern mystical feel but there is also a Canon of Yahweh, which is clearly meant to be a relic of the Bible, since it references Adam and, much later, ‘through a glass darkly’, St Paul).
When we get to read snippets of any the ‘Canons’, they appear to be standard Eastern-style mysticism, designed to capture absence, to move the mind beyond striving and agency, into the quiet place beyond. The same Taoist vibe, a feel for alternative ways of – not even thinking, that is too instrumental – alternative ways of being a consciousness:
The way that can be gone
is not the eternal Way.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
Then off Falk sets, walking west, and proceeds to have two kinds of experience: one is a series of Nature experiences which give Le Guin the opportunity of writing vivid descriptions of the unspoiled natural landscape – camping out under the stars, wandering through the dense virgin forest, fording streams or river, which are often very beautiful. She’s a country girl at heart and her love of nature, virgin untamed nature, comes over very strongly in many passages.
His days were all the same. Gray winter light; a wind blowing; forest-clad hills and valleys, long slopes, brush-hidden streams, swampy lowlands. Though badly overgrown the Hirand Road was easy to follow, for it led in long straight shafts or long easy curves, avoiding the bogs and the heights. In the hills Falk realized it followed the course of some great ancient highway, for its way had been cut right through the hills, and two thousand years had not effaced it wholly. But the trees grew on it and beside it and all about it, pine and hemlock, vast holly-thickets on the slopes, endless stands of beech, oak, hickory, alder, ash, elm, all overtopped and crowned by the lordly chestnuts only now losing their last dark-yellow leaves, dropping their fat brown burrs along the path. At night he cooked the squirrel or rabbit or wild hen he had bagged from among the infinity of little game that scurried and flitted here in the kingdom of the trees; he gathered beechnuts and walnuts, roasted the chestnuts on his campfire coals.
The other type of experience is the steady stream of Encounters Falk has with representative examples of Fallen Humanity, of the weirdness and sometimes terrifying violence, the resentment and suspicion and paranoia of the isolated communities he stumbles across.
EVERYBODY is convinced The Shing are out there, the Shing are the Fathers of Lies, nobody can trust anyone else – ‘Are you Shing?’ ‘No, are you Shing?’ – because the Shing move among us in human form, are indistinguishable from us, How do we know you’re not Shing? At some moments Falk even wonders if he himself is one of the Shing, let loose in some experiment which has gone wrong. He discusses it with Zove:
Thus Falk discovers how the Shing, although supposedly few in number, have sown suspicion and discord among all mankind (well, here in America at any rate), and this explains the extremely paranoid and sometimes super-violent reception he gets at various settlements scattered through the great Forest.
Encounters
Ransifel Metok and Thurro accompany him a few days in the direction of Ransifel, supposedly another house-commune like their a few days west. But Falk decides to strike off directly west.
Hirand After eleven days travelling through wilderness he comes to the abandoned ruins of a great house. The Forest really is more abandoned, humanity more sparse and scattered than he or we had realised.
Argerd’s house / The house of Fear Days later he comes to a pretty house in a loop of the river with lights in the windows and is approaching when he is shot. He comes to tied to a chair in a basement where he is beaten and interrogated, having been injected by truth serum, by two violent paranoid men, Argerd and Drehnem. They throw him in pitch-black cellar where he becomes aware of mice scuttling around, mice which appear to be able to speak little tiny mice words. After a rough night sleeping on the dirt, he’s hauled out of the cellar and pushed on his way at laser-point by men who are, quite clearly, beside themselves with fear and paranoia.
Animals can speak Why? How? We’re never told. But Falk encounters a boar which stutters human speech to him. The mice in the House of Fear whisper to him. And he shoots a chicken which squawks the Law to him, Thou shalt not take life. This is weird and extra. It’s one of the class of details which I find unsettling all through Le Guin’s fiction.
The Listener After more miserable days travelling through unspoilt nature in wind and sleet, Falk comes to another isolated cabin. Turns out to be the isolated cabin of an old-timer who is a Listener, a mindhearer, an empath i.e. he can hear other people’s thoughts but can’t actively send thoughts. Various characters have the ability of mindspeech. They ‘bespeak’ one another. This had occurred in the earlier books and is a recurring feature of the stories set in the Hainish universe.
The old-timer is wise in an Old West kind of way, takes Falk in, dries and feeds him and discusses his quest, in an oblique, worldly-wise kind of way.
The slider The old timer gives Falk his slider, a kind of hover-scooter.
Falk knelt on the slider, an elegant little machine, black paristolis inlaid with a three-dimensional arabesque of platinum wire. The ornamentation all but concealed the controls, but he had played with a slider at Zove’s House, and after studying the control-arcs a minute he touched the left arc, moved his finger along it till the slider had silently risen about two feet, and then with the right arc sent the little craft slipping over the yard and the river-bank till it hovered above the scummy ice of the backwater below the cabin. He looked back then to call goodbye, but the old man had already gone into the cabin and shut the door. And as Falk steered his noiseless craft down the broad dark avenue of the river, the enormous silence closed in around him again.
Falk flies for days along the great river which seems to be heading West to Es Toch. At one point he flies past a yacht, a surreal encounter, crewed by a handful of happy singing people, utterly incongruous with the previous people we’d met, rough and violent settlers. They sing at him as he whizzes past that they are ‘men’ which sends a shiver through him, a shiver of fear. The odd way they use the phrase ‘men’… did it mean they were Shing? Le Guin is capable of great descriptive passages…
He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in. The weather was mild, a calm sunlit spell of late winter. Thinking back to the Forest he felt as if he had come out of stifling, secret darkness into light and air, as if the prairies were one enormous Clearing. Wild red cattle in herds of tens of thousands darkened the far plains like cloud-shadows. The ground was everywhere dark, but in places misted faintly with green where the first tiny double-leaved shoots of the hardiest grasses were opening; and above and below the ground was a constant scurrying and burrowing of little beasts, rabbits, badgers, coneys, mice, feral cats, moles, stripe-eyed arcturies, antelope, yellow yappers, the pests and pets of fallen civilizations. The huge sky whirred with wings. At dusk along the rivers flocks of white cranes settled, the water between the reeds and leafless cotton-woods mirroring their long legs and long uplifted wings.
But, personally, I find them nearly always undermined by an atmosphere of unease, nameless dread, fear and anxiety. Her books make me anxious. Two weeks of reading Ursula Le Guin has made me considerably more anxious and worried than I was before.
And, sure enough, one sunny day Falk is scooting happily along the river when out of nowhere some kind of guided missile appears as a thin sliver, then is upon him and BANG!
The Basnasska Falk wakes up in a teepee belonging to the Mzurra Society of the Basnasska, a tribe who live much like the old native Americans, only rougher and harsher. Somehow they’ve got their hands on a handful of pieces of tech including guided missiles which attack other new tech, hence them blowing up his slider with what we are later told is a bombird. Apart from that they are Stone Age savages. They give him a blood-christening, tattoo him and, at first, I thought they’d blinded him, that’s what the text says – but it eventually becomes clear that his eyes are only bandaged.
Strella
Falk is tended by a submissive woman names Strella and they forge a bond, despite her routinely being taken off to be ‘used’ by a different tribesman each night. After several disappointments they seize an opportunity to escape, Falk shooting a Basnasska dead with his laser gun, and they make off through blizzards in the depths of winter.
Le Guin has an affinity for winter, for intense, life-threatening journeys through blizzards – it’s just such a long gruelling trek that forms the core of The Left Hand of Darkness.
After stumbling through snowdrifts and nearly dying fording a freezing cold river, Strella brings them to a place she knows on the other bank, scooping down through the snow to find the hidden entrance to a vast underground cavern. Here in its mysterious depths, they light a fire and survive, huddling together for warmth and, inevitably, having sex. Falk is perplexed by Strella’s coldness and absence. She is utterly passive, secret, remote, self contained. She explains that she was travelling with a man who the Basnasska murdered, which sort of explains it. But for my part, it’s just another example of Le Guin’s characters’ fundamental coldness towards each other. There is no loving-kindness in Le Guin’s novels. I find them emotionally barren places to be.
Eventually, having rested & recovered, they re-emerge and set off on a huge trek across the Great Plains
The Bee-keepers They comes across this tribe – ‘literate and laser-armed, all clothed alike, men and women, in long shifts of yellow wintercloth marked with a brown cross on the breast, they were hospitable and uncommunicative’. But most people in Le Guin are profoundly uncommunicative.
They move on. They come across five or six settlements in three hundred miles. Sounds like North America is less populated than it was by the native Americans. Five days, six days, out into vast open plains. They comes across the detritus of long buried cities, pottery and plastic. Crossing a river Strella loses the little jade amulet she wore round her neck, and used to mutter prayers to all the time. Must have been fording the last river. She is inconsolable. She becomes sick and ill. In the barren plains there is no water. They both become weak then exhausted. She mutters in a language he does not know, briefly refers to him as Ramarren then Falk… Finally, in the last phases of exhaustion, they see the lights of a building.
The Master of the Kansas Enclave A classic post-apocalypse type, the big strong leader – Prince he calls himself – ‘an old, jetblack man seven feet tall with a face like a swordblade’ – of an isolated community.
‘This is the Kansas Enclave. I am its master. I am its lord, its Prince and God. I am in charge of what happens here. Here we play one of the great games. King of the Castle it’s called. The rules are very old, and are the only laws that bind me. I make the rest.’
He handles a patterning-frame.
All the top of the table, Falk now saw, was sunk several inches into a frame, and contained a network of gold and silver wires upon which beads were strung, so pierced that they could slip from wire to wire and, at certain points, from level to level. There were hundreds of beads, from the size of a baby’s fist to the size of an apple seed, made of clay and rock and wood and metal and bone and plastic and glass and amethyst, agate, topaz, turquoise, opal, amber, beryl, crystal, garnet, emerald, diamond.
Which sort of predicts the future. But nothing is ever clear in Le Guin, just as nothing is ever really clearly communicated, and nobody is ever really close, even when they’re making love. The Prince of Kansas strongly advises Falk to go on alone, to ditch Strella. When Fallk tells the Prince Strella is a Wanderer he bursts out laughing, ‘Yes and I am a fish!’ – but Falk thinks this stems from the misogyny and sexism of his colony (which of these isolated settlements does not treat its women like chattels? only Zove’s, right at the start.)
Besdio Days of walking, trekking. They arrive at Besdio a settlement of four houses. The people are reserved, distant, let them sleep in a cowshed. One of them has a replacement jade amulet he gives Strella to her delight. They lend them mules. They are in the foothills now of what are presumably the Rocky Mountains.
Falk and Strella arrive at Es Toch
Finally they arrive at foothills where there are more than scattered settlements, where there are rows of cabins, huts, paths which turns into tracks between dwellings, numbers of people passing to and fro. It is the outskirts of Es Toch, the City of Lies.
The City of the Lords of Earth was built on the two rims of a canyon, a tremendous cleft through the mountains, narrow, fantastic, its black walls striped with green plunging terrifically down half a mile to the silver tinsel strip of a river in the shadowy depths. On the very edges of the facing cliffs the towers of the city jutted up, hardly based on earth at all, linked across the chasm by delicate bridgespans. Towers, roadways and bridges ceased and the wall closed the city off again just before a vertiginous bend of the canyon. Helicopters with diaphanous vanes skimmed the abyss, and sliders flickered along the half-glimpsed streets and slender bridges. The sun, still not far above the massive peaks to eastward, seemed scarcely to cast shadows here; the great green towers shone as if translucent to the light.
Bewildered by number of people and sizes of buildings he has never seen before, Falk lets himself be guided towards a tall building and through its doors into a vast hall and then men are approaching from all sides and when he reaches for his laser he realises Strella has taken it, as the men close in and start beating him, the last thing he hears is something unprecedented… her mocking laugh!
When he regains consciousness (Le Guin characters are frequently regaining consciousness, puzzled and disorientated) he is hallucinating that he is a room made entirely of diaphanous, see-through surfaces in which invisible zips open and close to let people in or out. A short lordly man dressed in unisex clothes apparently named Kradgy and another who is… Strella! He overhears them discussing him as if he was an animal. The man asks Strella why it took her so long to bring him in. She describes how difficult it was to track him, how ‘they’ only dropped her a manfinder when she was deep in the Forest, how ‘he’ was already too close to the land of the Bansasska, how she had to join that tribe and pretend to be one of them… Falk hears how the jade amulet she muttered into was in fact some kind of radio which she used to keep in touch with her masters here.
She is, in other words, one of them, one of the Shing, an agent dropped to lure him and bring him to them.
Falk realises how stupid he’s been, how everyone from Zove to the Prince told him to travel alone and yet he was lured by her cause then by lust then by what he thought of as concern or love or some such. All the time he was being played.
In fact the True Lords as they call themselves treat Falk fantastically well. He has a luxury room to himself, servants bring him food and drink, he is up on the umpteenth floor of some skyscraper, when he is rested they take him to a tailor to be fitted with their type of clothes.
Then they introduce him to a youth of sixteen who introduces himself as Har Orry, son of Har Weden, and tells Falk that Falk’s real name is Agad Ramarren.
Agad Ramarren from Werel
If it was a shock to the reader to realise that Strella was a Shing agent all along, it genuinely turns the world on its head to learn that Falk is a ‘Kelshy’, a member of the Kelshak Nation from the planet Werel – the same planet Werel which is the setting for this book’s predecessor, Planet of Exile. So this book is linked with its predecessors! Is one of the Hainish cycle, part of the Hainish universe! The knowledge comes as a massive jolt to the reader’s sense of who, where and what.
Falk learns that Werel was settled by Terran colonists thousands of years ago, their knowledge level sank slowly, surrounded by the savage local tribes – until the great siege of the Gaal (the subject of Planet of Exile). But the two species interbred, led by the hero Alterra Agat – central character of Planet of Exile – and that began a slow rise again to civilisation and eventually the building of spaceships. And finally a crew of 12 or so were chosen to undertake the long space journey back to the home world of which so many millennia-old legends and myths were told – back to Terra, the home planet, aboard the spaceship Alterra.
One of the True Lords, Lord Abundibot, fills in the gaps in Orry’s story – on exiting near lightspeed warp drive as it approached earth, the entire crew blacked out and was attacked by Raiders, Bandits, who somehow patrol outer space. They had abducted a few of the ship’s crew when the Shing arrived, there was a firefight, the Bandits blew up the Alterra and one ship flew Ramarren down to the planet’s surface where his mind was razed, while another Bandit ship bearing Orry was captured.
Now he is kept docile and quiescent (as so many characters in Le Guin are) by means of a vape tube he sucks on and which contains some kind of tranquiliser, a parütha-tube. Falk learns that, ironically, he was the Navigator of the ship. Instead his mind was razed and he was abandoned in the deep forest to die, since even the Bandits cleave to the One Law, not to kill.
Slowly Falk/Ramarren is introduced to more of the lords and masters of Es Toch – Strella whose full name is Strella Siobelbel, Ken Kenyek. They are – as so many Le Guin characters – distant, cold and aloof, with no emotions: ‘they are like gods, cold and kind and wise – they hold themselves apart.’ They are natural telepaths, though Falk prefers to keep things at the spoken level. There aren’t many of them. They live widely scattered and confer in telepathic conferences, one of which Falk takes part in.
The lords now embark on a long campaign to persuade Falk/Ramarren that there was no Enemy. There was no war and no invasion of the League; what happened was natural organic disaffection and civil war among the planets of the League. They are not the Shing. There are no Shing.
‘We whom you know as Shing are men. We are Terrans, born on Earth of human stock, as was your ancestor Jacob Agat of the First Colony on Werel. Men have taught you what they believe about the history of Earth in the twelve centuries since the Colony on Werel was founded. Now we—men also —will teach you what we know:
‘No Enemy ever came from distant stars to attack the League of All Worlds. The League was destroyed by revolution, civil war, by its own corruption, militarism, despotism. On all the worlds there were revolts, rebellions, usurpations; from the Prime World came reprisals that scorched planets to black sand. No more lightspeed ships went out into so risky a future: only the FTLs, the missile-ships, the world-busters. Earth was not destroyed, but half its people were, its cities, its ships and ansibles, its records, its culture—all in two terrible years of civil war between the Loyalists and the Rebels, both armed with the unspeakable weapons developed by the League to fight an alien enemy.’
Can this be true? Is everything he ever learned at Zove’s House and everything everyone has told him on his long trek, is it all a lie? All rumour and paranoid fable? We’ve seen the low standard of the people he’s encountered, many little better than savages. Maybe they have got it all wrong.
Basically for the rest of the book, in conversations with Lord Abundibot and Orry, Falk – and the reader – are kept in a state of heightened confusion and uncertainty. Are they lying to him? Is young Orry telling the truth or is he a drugged pawn of the Shing? Are the lords really Terran humans or cunning Shing? (It’s only during lengthy conversations with Orry that Falk learns that Strella is not actually a Shing but one of the many human children sent to learn the ways of the City who become one of their servants.)
Mind restoration
Then they make the final mind-boggling revelation – that, despite his razing by the Rebels, Falk’s true Werel identity as Ramarren still exists in the deep basement of his brain. But that to revive it, the lords will have to remove, erase and obliterate the personality of Falk and everything he has experienced.
God, what a dilemma: should he submit to the operation in order to have his ‘true’ identity restored? Or is the entire thing a tissue of lies to get him agree to be razed and obliterated? A long chapter is devoted to Falks’ fears and counter-fears, arguments and counter-arguments. Eventually, with a heavy heart, he accedes. They have explained the procedure cannot be carried out unless he consents. He does consent. Falk is taken into the Operation Room with a bank of computers next to an operating table. Ken Kenyek starts applying electrodes to his head…
Then – he wakes up as Ramarren the Navigator from the planet Werel. The dramatic effect is striking. The reader awakens with Ramarren from a confused place. He is much more forceful and decisive than hesitating Falk. We see things through his eyes as he has explained to him what’s happened. From his perspective he remembers all the details of the spaceflight, he remembers all the preparations, the briefings, the goals of the expedition. Now he is puzzled as he awakes dazed and confused (as so many Le Guin characters awake dazed and confused) looking down to find his arms and hands not smooth and pale but thin, wasted, scarred and sunburnt from his long arduous trek.
A confusion not helped when the woman we know as Strella comes running into his room and tries to tell him he is Falk and is explaining what they experienced together when a lord strides in and mind blocks her with such ferocity that it makes Ramarren wince. The woman runs out weeping and Ramarren is now and permanently put on his guard. This is not the peaceful civilised home planet he had expected.
In two minds
As in the later books, what had been an external journey in part one now turns into a very densely and deeply imagined inner journey, as Ramarren falls prey to all kinds of doubts, despite the smooth blandishments of the lord and, late that night, in the wee small hours, undergoes a unique experience… he realises he is two persons!! The supposedly destroyed persona of Falk comes in waves back into his consciousness and he undergoes the sheer mortal terror of being two people at once!
As in The Left Hand of Darkness the external events and adventures are really a kind of hors d’oeuvre, designed to manoeuvre your mind into position, into such a weird alien place, that you will accept this mind-bending possibility – the possibility that a man may be two people at the same time. We experience the terror and vertigo that Falk/Ramarren experiences as he struggles through the night to manage the presence of two people inside his head.
The next day Ramarren spend pondering on the truth or falseness of the Shing. Lord Abundibot and Ken Kenyek both tell him there was no Enemy and they are humans in mindspeech and in mindspeech no-one is supposed to be able to lie. And yet Ramarren draws on Falk’s memories and all the things all the people he met told him, including that the Shing came from far away, from a start system beyond the Hyades, not many of them travelled that far, it didn’t take many to totally dominate mankind, to sow dissension, to breed out the winners and create a new breed of docile and fearful peasants scattered across the former populous continents.
If they are Shing, why are they being so fantastically considerate to him? Slowly it dawns on Ramarren that they don’t know where Werel is and they want to find out. They want to send Shing to Werel and destroy and enslave its population in turn. Probably. He speculates. At all costs he must not tell them.
And here the narrative uses a little gimmick which is the notion that some Code of Werel means that Ramarren himself cannot consciously admit Werel’s coordinates in space to anyone. That’s why they didn’t find it out when they had him unconscious on the operating table – they tried and failed and had to let him regain consciousness and find some other way to make him tell.
Another day of polite fencing ensue, with lord Abundibot and Kradgy and Ken Kenyek gently probing Ramarren in polite conversation. They tell him a spaceship is awaiting him at the spaceport to take him and Orry back to Werel. All they need is the co-ordinates, if he would be so kind as too… But he surprises them by telling them he can’t; his own programming forbids him from revealing the co-ordinates.
The following day the lords graciously take Orry and Ramarren on a guided tour of the grand city, in a flying aircar. This gives Le Guin the opportunity to invent all kinds of space age aspects of this dream city, while also giving us prolonged sequences of Ramarren’s ongoing agonising: is he right? Are they Shing? Or is the whole Shing thing a stone-age myth? I think we are meant to agree with him that they are Shing and have reduced and controlled humanity, because on several occasions we catch them lying, their interest in Werel’s location seems to confirm his paranoia, the way they treated Strella when she tried to get through to him, the way they are obviously keeping young Orry doped to the eyeballs…
Falk makes his escape
The novel ends very suddenly and abruptly. The day’s sightseeing is coming to a charming end after a day spent in a flying car which took them to see inhabitants of some islands off the coast who live a life of luxury and ease, sun, sand and sex. On the way back Ramarren feels a sudden shift or dislocation and realises that his guide, Ken Kenyek, has, after much patient probing, achieved complete mindgrip and mindlock with him. Everything is sweet and polite – ‘Isn’t that nice and comfortable now?’ – and Ken is settling in to carry out more questioning about the location of Werel, in fact Ken has narrowed the probable location down correctly to the sun Eltanin, in the Dragon constellation, but…
The Shing – if he is a Shing – doesn’t realise there are two people in Ramarren’s head – and while his entire mind is in phase with Ramarren’s, Falk appears, a complete stunning surprise, and staggers Ken’s mind. For that brief moment of helplessness, Ramarren strikes and counter-seizes Ken. Now he is a puppet.
Quickly Ramarren interrogates the powerless Shing and establishes there is a spaceport a few miles north of the city, with ships fuelled and waiting including the one scheduled to take him to Werel. Ramarren gets Orry to fly them there. The port and spaceships are hidden by a kind of screening device which hides everything but their shimmering outlines. These, Ramarren thinks, are the interstellar spaceships of the Shing (is he right?)
Ramarren gets Kenyek to explain the layout of the port (the control rooms are underground) and to lead him and the confused, dopy, dazed Orry to the underground control room where Ramarren a) stuns Kenyek using his own stun gun, and b) sets the co-ordinates of Werel (destroying the computer record afterwards). Here he – and the reader – receive final confirmation that the lords are indeed the Shing, because as he struggles to program the computer he discovers that:
Some of the processes the Shing used and built into their computers were entirely alien to Cetian mathematical process and logic; and nothing else could have so firmly persuaded Ramarren that the Shing were, indeed, alien to Earth, alien to all the old League worlds, conquerors from some very distant world. He had never been quite sure that Earth’s old histories and tales were correct on that point, but now he was convinced, and then up and into the spaceship assigned to fly to Werel. It is of course, ready and full of fuel and provisions.
It takes hours to run the program during which Falk’s part of his mind has time to reflect on his adventures, his encounters, all the things people told him, to wonder where Strella is now, and what she really is. Above all to reflect on the strange fate of the Shing.
He thought about Estrel, wondering where she was now and what she was now. Had they retrained her, razed her mind, killed her? No, they did not kill. They were afraid to kill and afraid to die, and called their fear Reverence for Life. The Shing, the Enemy, the Liars… Did they in truth lie? Perhaps that was not quite the way of it; perhaps the essence of their lying was a profound, irremediable lack of understanding. They could not get into touch with men. They had used that and profited by it, making it into a great weapon, the mindlie; but had it been worth their while, after all? Twelve centuries of lying, ever since they had first come here, exiles or pirates or empire-builders from some distant star, determined to rule over these races whose minds made no sense to them and whose flesh was to them forever sterile. Alone, isolated, deafmutes ruling deafmutes in a world of delusions…
Finally the computer spits out a little sliver of iridium which contains the programming information. With that safely in his hand he wipes all record of what he’s done and carries the paralysed Ken Kenyek, pulling dopy Ory along with him and up into the spaceship, slips the iridium into the onboard computer, straps Ken and himself in, assures Orry they are going home and presses the controls.
In a few years of their time they will cover the 140 light years distance to Werel and then he, Orry and Ken Kenyek will get to tell their story to the Werelites, and the truth, one way or the other, will out.
Thoughts
1. Altered states
From start to finish it’s a novel about fragmented and lost identities, about psychological damage and the nature of reality – so it reminded me all the way through of the novels of Philip K Dick and his abiding fascination with reality and dreams and alternate states of mind. Maybe it was something in the air or the water or the Kool-Aid of the 1960s which, after all, saw widespread experimenting with consciousness altering drugs, which many enthusiasts thought would provide a panacea to all human ills.
I wonder whether Le Guin ever experimented with mind-altering drugs, or was it a purely imaginative interest in alternative psychological states – it’s certainly a mighty strong theme and recurring subject matter in her fiction. Subsequent novels like The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Lathe of Heaven (1971) testify to her enduring interest in really weird alternative modes of thinking and perceiving.
Commentators dwell on her interest in Eastern mysticism and the kind of Zen, detached mindsets it encourages – but from one angle that entire subject is really a sub-set of her much bigger, all-encompassing interest in alternative states of mind – for example, the importance of dreams and dreaming which is the (spooky) central subject of The Lathe of Heaven.
2. Harshness
There’s something harsh and unforgiving about Le Guin’s fiction.
On the face of it her environmentalism and her mysticism and her sympathy with underdog species (which she’s invented) ought to create a warm and sympathetic vibe. But it doesn’t.
It’s not just the way this story has no real resolution which makes it dissatisfying – it’s the whole series of hard-faced, sometimes brutal, sometimes just cold characters and incidents which feature all through the novel which put my hackles up, which created a barrier between her and me.
Take the relationship between Ramarran and the orphaned Har Orry. In another author’s hands this might have become a warm, avuncular relationship. They might have helped each other or comforted each other. But there is generally little comfort in Le Guin and so right to the last pages Orry is just a burden, possibly a trap, a drugged puppet telling lies.
People are killed off very casually. There’s something upsetting about the way Ramarren knows he’ll never see again beautiful Parth, his partner at the House of Zove, or is so totally betrayed by Strella whose life he helped to save. And I am still reeling from the way Estraven, the character we had spent so much time and effort getting to know, is simply shot dead at the end of The Left Hand of Darkness.
Plenty of American fiction is cold and brutal, like the entire genre of the detective story. But at least those kinds of stories have a glamour and a mystique. There is no glamour here. Everyone betrays everyone else. Humanity is humiliated. I finish each of these Le Guin novels feeling progressively more battered and hurt. Something genuinely strange happens while reading her fiction. But it’s not a pleasant experience.
Related links
Reviews of Ursula Le Guin novels
1966 Rocannon’s World
1966 Planet of Exile
1967 City of Illusions
1968 A Wizard of Earthsea
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
1971 The Lathe of Heaven
1972 The Word for World Is Forest
1974 The Dispossessed
Other science fiction reviews
Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels
1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…
1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars
1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard man Gulliver Foyle is looking for vengeance
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undergo a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve read
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1980s
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – burnt-out cyberspace cowboy Case is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero, while the daughter of a Japanese ganster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer
1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative history Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population under control
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